The Monroe County Council begins to focus more intently on the anticipated new jail budget figures

Monroe County, Indiana – The Monroe County Council received a briefing this past Tuesday during its meeting, which included an estimate of the hard construction costs for a new jail with 400 beds as opposed to 500 beds.

A 500-bed jail versus a 400-bed jail would differ in hard construction costs by approximately $20.2 million. This is predicated on a 400-bed facility’s 120,000 square feet and a 500-bed facility’s 150,000 square feet, with a construction cost per square foot of $674.

An $80.9 million hard construction cost is projected for a 400-bed new jail. There are now 287 beds in the facility.

An additional $78.7 million is projected to be needed for the hard construction of a new, 50% larger judicial complex that will be built beside a new jail. Based on a 136,848-square-foot building with a $575 per square foot cost, that is. The present justice buildings have 91,222 square feet of space.

Including 20% for “soft costs,” the total cost of a new, 400-bed jail and a co-located judicial institution would be roughly $199.6 million. Contingency, professional fees, land purchase, FFE (furniture, fixtures, and equipment), bond counsel, permits, printing, and similar expenses are examples of soft expenditures.

The county council was briefed on Tuesday by Scott Carnegie of DLZ Corporation and Chris Ciolli of Weddle Bros. Construction, who provided all of the numbers.

It occurred shortly after a storm that swept across the county, knocking out power for a day or perhaps four for a number of Duke Energy customers. The county courthouse had electricity on Tuesday night.

During the meeting on Tuesday, a few of the group Care not Cages spoke against building a new jail while using the public microphone.

Although a site for the new Monroe County jail has not yet been chosen, some pre-design work can be completed without regard to the location.

Carnegie pointed out that master planning, conceptual design, and programming are all included in the pre-design stage. According to Carnegie, master planning and conceptual design are site-specific, but the programming phase is not.

Determining the precise functional and spatial requirements of a new jail, such as the number of beds, administrative spaces, security specifications, and the supervision model, is known as programming. The partitioning of the facility into pods, control rooms, direct supervision with officers inside cell blocks, and other hybrid approaches are examples of county prison supervision models.

The North Park PUD on West Hunter Valley Road is the specific location that Monroe County commissioners are now debating. The commissioners approved a roughly $5,000 increase to the contract with VET Environmental this past Wednesday during the work session meeting. This is for extra digging samples that are part of the Phase 2 environmental research for the North Park site. The Phase 2 study contract had an initial value of $28,417 and was previously approved.

VET has already submitted the Phase 1 environmental study and site survey to the county.

Counties council members appeared relieved to have at last seen some hard data linking the price to the number of beds on Tuesday.

The square footage and cost projections, according to councilor Peter Iversen, showed improvement. Iversen was pleased to see that the projected expenses were divided into distinct figures for the jail and the justice center, as well as a different analysis based on a conceptual budget of $180 million as opposed to $200 million.

Carnegie said he could provide a breakdown of expenditures for a 300-bed hospital when Councilor Kate Wiltz asked for one.

Recently, disagreements about who gets to make the decision over the number of beds have arisen between the county commissioners and the county council. The county commissioners recently threw the bed-counting decision into the hands of the county council.

A few months ago, the county council expressed its opinion through a policy statement that set a 400-bed cap for the new jail. A more recent recommendation from a county commissioners’ legally mandated feasibility assessment suggested that 450–500 beds was the ideal quantity.

The RQAW Corporation’s suggestion has drawn criticism since the statistic was derived from a simple average of the jail bed per capita in the six counties that surround Monroe County.

The financial options for a new jail have also become more apparent throughout the last week or so. The county government’s long-term financial planning consultant, Financial Services Group, made a presentation on Friday of the previous week, and it was based on their findings that the $200 million co-located jail and justice center could be funded.

The $200 million price tag would be covered by imposing a 0.2 percent local income tax (LIT), which would bring in almost $8.5 million year, specifically for the construction of the jail.
Additionally, it would entail utilizing the majority of the extra funds from the approximately $11.2 million that the Monroe County government already receives from the relatively recent economic development LIT, which was approved by the Bloomington city council in May 2022.

Trent Deckard, the president of the county council, stated during the meeting this past Tuesday that the council must now begin tying “options for funding with options for action.” Deckard went on to add that a number of different elected officials will be involved. “We want to honor those wishes as best we can while we figure out the funding,” Deckard continued.

Deckard called the state of affairs at the moment “one big giant mud ball.” “The goal of this council is to take [the updated cost estimates] and try to clear that mud up,” he continued.
The findings of two consultants who made recommendations to Monroe County nearly three years ago are what motivate the county’s consideration of building a replacement detention facility. According to one of the reports, “The jail facility is failing.”

The ACLU sued the jail in 2009 about overcrowding there, and the two parties reached a settlement agreement that governs how the institution is run now. There have been multiple extensions to the settlement agreement.

According to Indiana’s County facility Standards and inspections by the Indiana Department of Correction, the facility had a rating capacity of 278 secure beds at the time of the settlement agreement. Thirty more beds are designated for trustees and offenders enrolled in a specific program.

In order to prevent the population from surpassing the jail’s capacity, the jail staff is required by the settlement agreement to notify the circuit court judges when the number of available security beds reaches 244 and request an order to release the detainees.